Women with certain cardiometabolic risk factors, including type 2 diabetes and high waist circumference, face a greater increase in risk for liver fibrosis than men with the same risk factors. The study, just published in JAMA Network Open, is one of the first to explore sex differences in cardiometabolic risk factors for liver fibrosis, a condition on the rise globally. Data came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The researchers included data from 5,981 U.S. adults, representative of the U.S. population with an average age of 47, collected between 2017 and 2020. They analyzed whether the link between liver fibrosis and key cardiometabolic risk factors differed by sex, including waist circumference, high blood pressure, diabetes or pre-diabetes, high triglycerides, low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and the presence of two or more of these factors. In their statistical analysis, the researchers controlled for age, race, ethnicity, smoking and alcohol intake to rule out the influence of those factors. Overall, women faced similar or lower baseline rates of liver fibrosis compared with men. However, when certain risk factors were present, women’s fibrosis rates tended to increase more sharply than men. For example, high waist circumference was associated with an increase in fibrosis rates from 0.8% to 9.2% in women (about 11-fold), compared with an increase from 4.4% to 17.0% in men (about fourfold). Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes was linked to a 2.8-fold increase in fibrosis rates among women, versus a 1.4-fold increase among men. Having two or more cardiometabolic risk factors was associated with an 8.4-fold increase in women, compared to a 2.6-fold increase in men. The findings underscore that maintaining good heart and metabolic health has implications well beyond heart disease prevention.

A study that looked at over 3,000 women experiencing a first pregnancy determined that persistently higher stress levels were associated with high blood pressure post pregnancy, specifically in women who had faced adverse pregnancy outcomes, or complications in pregnancy, including high blood pressure, pre-term birth, having a smaller baby or stillbirth.